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Global Game JamTaipei Game ShowCarolina Games SummitEngage! Expo NYC
 | V I S U A L A R T S How To Render Light Maps in XNA by Rikcuo Akira (Taiwan), posted 12/14/09 Using 3DS Max 2008 and Panda Plugin - a simple step-by-step guide |  | B O O K R E V I E W Building Social Web Applications by John Hattan, posted 12/12/09 We review O'Reilly's latest guide to designing and leveraging social networks. |
 | M U S I C A N D S O U N D A Brief Guide to Orchestration by Steve Kaetzel, posted 12/7/09 A crash course in the basics of classical orchestration for beginner and intermediate game composers |  | S W E E T S N I P P E T Response Curves in XML for Game Parametrization by Diego B.S., posted 11/30/09 A basic programming rule is to avoid using parameters and magic numbers directly in source code. This article proposes an addition to this well-known design pattern, explaining a simple way to parametrize in xml the response curves that otherwise may be hard-coded |
Flavien Brebion Flavien "Ysaneya" Brebion talks in-depth and technical about his procedurally-generated space MMO Infinity
| Monday, December 14, 2009 | |
| The Daily GameDev.net | |
| Posted by: Oli Wilkinson at 1:01:46 PM | |
 It's Monday. Tell me why I don't like them. Another week of work, but it's the last week until Christmas so hey that's something to celebrate. Mike's busy studying today so you get the first of a double dose of me this week. You know you love it.So what happened over the weekend? Unity Holiday Discount: Unity are celebrating the Holiday season by offering a discount of 20% off everything in their store until the 31st Dec 2009. You need to enter the special code (listed here) to get it, mind. Player 2 Up: Atari's CEO David Gardner has stepped down to be replaced by Jeff Lapin - the fourth CEO for Atari in 3 years, although both Gardner and former-CEO Phil Harrison remain on the board of directors. GDC 2010 Sessions: The first sessions for the 2010 GDC in San Francisco have been announced. We have Naughty Dog's Richard Lemarchand, Double Fine's Peter Demoreuille and Drew Skillman talking about design, programming and graphics. On the Audio front there's Viceral Games' composer Garry Schyman and EA's audio director Paul Gorman talking about the music of Dante's Inferno. Jonathan Blow talks about the mechanics of designing and coding Braid and Foundation 9's VP Chirs Charla picks up some discussion about the business of working with someone else's IP. Sounds like an interesting lineup already, I'm sure more details will follow. As usual GameDev.net will be sending a team of crack reporters to feed back on the biggest game developer's event of the year. Where do they get those wonderful toys?: Activision have (unsurprisingly) announced that a sequel to Batman Arkham Asylum is in development at Rocksteady Studios. Batman AA is my favourite game of the year - I enjoyed it more than MW2. And I'm not the only one to think so, as Rocksteady have won "Studio of the year" at this year's Video Game Awards. Well done folks, I can't wait to see Batman 2. Talk about sequels: So Star Wars: The Force Unleashed developers Aspyr have had a bit of a rough time as of late, with Trent reporting on Friday that they've lost an estimated 50% of their staff. It can't be any consolence that LucasArts have announced that The Force Unleashed is getting a sequel and it looks like it's being developed internally in their San Francisco studio. The link has a trailer, check it out. R18+: Australia's been a bit behind the curve with their ratings system for a while, banning games left right and centre that the rest of the world laps up. Well it looks like the Government are finally willing to listen to the public and will be asking people to fill out a questionnaire to help the politicians decide whether they should allow for an R18+ rating for games (like films have currently). Here's hoping our Aussie friends get some justice! PS3 Losing Cash: Again, not a huge shock - but the PS3 is still selling at a loss with around $31 per console sold going into the ether. But that $31 is the lowest gap in history for the company and it's likely that it may see break-even or even profit in the future. It's interesting to see that the Blu-ray drive is the most expensive component in the box - but I think it's justified, if people are like me and have it as their primary Blu-ray player. David Braben Spaces Out to Pink Floyd. Love the Floyd. Love Braben. Get in. Rock Band: Green Day. It makes more sense than the others. Read More.. | 3 Comments | |
| Friday, December 11, 2009 | |
| Weekend Reading: Tales from Journal Land | |
| Posted by: Drew Sikora at 7:03:14 PM | |
| Entries from 12/4 - 12/10 Journal Land Pick of the Week Journal of Aardvajk - Aardvajk has a great new video for Squishy that shows the game's introduction, along with the scripting file that makes it all happen. Looks awesome! As one of the more longer-running consistent projects here on the site, I salute you, Aardvajk. Keep it up. Welcome back or thanks for dropping by ApochPiQ, coderx75, Trapper Zoid, and Prinz Eugn! Read More.. | 0 Comments | |
| Game Connection Europe 2009 concludes and indicates high expectations for 2010 | |
| Posted by: Drew Sikora at 12:02:39 PM | |
 Game Connection has concluded yesterday having hosted more than 230 exhibitors from 33 different countries. The 9th edition of the renown game industry business convention offered two new features for this year: conferences dedicated to working with IP owners and discussing raising funds in the video game industry. It also premiered the results of its first research study: The 2010 Game Industry Survey.Read More.. | 0 Comments | |
| The Daily GameDev.net | |
| Posted by: Trent Polack at 12:04:31 AM | |
| How are all of you crazy kids doing? Did you know it's Friday? It's Friday. This makes me happy. Yesterday was filled with sad news. The big headliner for most of the day was that Harmonix laid off 39 employees which equates to about 13% of the Rock Band creator's workforce. Quoth the unnamed MTV Games representative: "We can confirm that 39 positions were eliminated today at Harmonix as part of re-structuring to better align our staffing to best suit our product development plans and schedules moving forward, [...] Those affected were primarily in QA. The others affected ranged from administrative to other various roles within the company." The other big sadness-filled rumor is that publisher Aspyr Media is underwent large-scale layoffs about two weeks ago. The number being floated is around 50% of the company's work-force. Aspyr's most recent work is the PC release of Star Wars: The Force Unleashed (Star Wars The Force Unleashed Ultimate Edition). In other news, Ready at Dawn is scaling up with the hire of Jonathan Nagel. Nagel was previously a sales veteran of Scaleform (get the pun now?) and was brought on to Ready at Dawn to market the company's forthcoming multiplatform game engine. Halo: Reach will, apparently, be the biggest game of 2010. NPD day was yesterday and it revealed the little-known and unexpected fact that Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 sold a lot of copies. Over six million copies, to be specific; and that's just in the United States. Other games on the list included New Super Mario Bros. for the Wii, Assassin's Creed 2, and Left 4 Dead 2. Bayonetta still looks kind of insane. And that's it for me. This is a short GameDev.net Daily because I got home late tonight and, well, while I love all of you, Pixeljunk Shooter was also released onto the Playstation Network and if I don't play it immediately I'm pretty sure I will die. I'm pretty sure that's how biology works. Read More.. | 3 Comments | |
| Thursday, December 10, 2009 | |
| The Daily GameDev.net | |
| Posted by: Drew Sikora at 12:33:05 PM | |
 Today is Thursday, which is the day before Friday, which makes is a pretty cool day, but still leaves you enough time to ruin your week before the Friday Whistle blows. But whatever, I've harped on all this before and really have nothing new to say. Blah blah blah... GDNet Daily Time!!Studio News: Sensory Sweep, FuzzyEyes, Threewave, Sledgehammer Games. A local Utah paper covers the story about the massive implosion of indie studio Sensory Sweep, which still owes close to one million USD in unpaid wages to ~200 former employees. Keep that escape hatch unlocked and ready at all times, people. Don't have one? Spend some effort looking for one unless you too want to be stuck in a job that isn't paying because you have nowhere else to go. (Thanks to Jay Barnson for the tip) FuzzyEyes, developer of Edge of Twilight and another Australian-based studio, was forced to lay off the majority of its staff and shift the game's development overseas. We're sorry to see another AU studio affected, especially in Brisbane, an AU game dev hotspot. Threewave Studios is another developer affected by the economy that went into a "reorganisation phase" and is located in Vancouver, one of the up-and-coming Canadian game dev cities. Sledghammer Games, however, is sailing along fine - but they've only just gotten started and therefore are hiring like mad to get momentum rolling on their first project, which is still a mystery. Aussie game ratings scene heats up. The whole issue over Australia's rating system not allowing any room for games rated above 15+ is continuing to pick up steam, which is a good thing. The more of an issue this becomes hopefully means the more people will work to get it resolved - properly. The latest victim of the AU ratings board is Aliens vs. Predator and it won't be the last. There's still hope, however. Kotaku's Luke Plunkett shares his opinion on the matter in defense of Australia, the Interactive Gaming & Entertainment Association sent a direct response to Australian Censorship Minister Michael Atkinson, and ~50 people have gathered for a rally in Brisbane (hey, it's a start right?). Our own Andrew Russell also wrote in to his Attorney General with support on the issue. The next step that everyone is fighting for is to get the Commonwealth Minister of Home Affairs, Brendan O'Connor, to release a paper outlining the internal discussion over the 18+ rating. Finally, GameSpot has an instructional video for game developers looking to release titles in Australia without being banned - no they apparently couldn't resist. Oh, and David Jaffe says it's all "Utter BS". Brazil contemplating violent games ban. Things aren't looking so good in South America either. As I reported back in November, Venezuela already has a violent game sales law in full effect, and now Brazil is taking steps to do the same, with much the same in the way of punishment as well - 1 to 3 years of incarceration. We have visitors from Brazil to this site often, according to our Analytics, so I say to them: FIGHT THIS NOW. ESRB applauded by FTC for excellent regulation. Coming state-side things are looking pretty good, as a recently-released report from the Federal Trade Commission commends the Entertainment Software Rating Board, saying the ratings system prevents 80% of M-rated content from being sold to minors. This is a good thing because it helps take the heat off the industry from senators still looking into government control over the distribution of games here in the US. Yes, we have plenty of our own problems as well, but thankfully also have organizations like the ESA to step up to the plate when the US Senate gets ideas in their heads. Quirky game dev facts: Majora's Mask bet and MJ's Sonic tunes. If you've played Zelda: Majora's Mask for the N64 and loved it (like I did) prepare to have your view of the game shattered when you realize it was made off a bet to Miyamoto-san and only took a year to develop. Fortunately this new perspective on the game makes it just all that more awesome. Another wake up call is the fact that Michael Jackson worked on Sonic 3. All you MJ fans now have a few "new" tracks to listen to. Heck, MJ even inspired Sonic's shoes. Daily Remainders - more cool stories that didn't make the cut along with game dev articles/features. Hey you! Yes, you. Are you an animator? If so, check out SOE's animation contest for DC Universe Online. If you think your game is awesomesauce, well Simon Cowell is on his way to being able to tell you how much your game really sucks and that his is way better. My last classification of the day: If you're a developer anywhere within easy travel time to NYC, I expect to see you at the IGDA holiday party next Monday. Excuses will not be accepted. Can I go play with my new Bamboo Pen + Touch tablet now? I can? Thanks, see ya next week.  Read this post in ChineseUPDATE: Jay Barnson now has his own blog post about the Sensor Sweep fiasco. Read More.. | 4 Comments | |
| Wednesday, December 9, 2009 | |
| Mixamo and TurboSquid Collaborate to Optimize High-quality 3D Character Animation | |
| Posted by: Liaison PR at 12:09:50 PM | |
| Improving the overall character creation and animation experience for 3D professionals, game artists and animators, Mixamo today announced a partnership with TurboSquid, the world’s largest online 3D marketplace, to offer “Mixamo-certified” models assured to work seamlessly with the entire collection of motions found on www.mixamo.com. Read More.. | 0 Comments | |
| The Daily GameDev.net | |
| Posted by: Mike Stedman at 11:56:20 AM | |
| Welcome to a mid-week GDNet Daily. I'm taking over for Oli today, and he'll be replacing me next Monday, which should improve the start of your week substantially, I imagine. Nintendo has made a really bad move by bringing New Super Mario Bros for the Wii to seniors' communities; based on what I've seen of the cooperative gameplay, we're going to be seeing a lot of our elders going at each other with brass knuckles for jumping on heads while they were making a jump. Beloved Sega title Yakuza 3 has been confirmed to come to North America, but it will come out so late as to be mostly irrelevant, similar to how Yakuza 2 was released out here. Folks, you have to go get this game when it finally hits here (in March). There's also some leaked Bioshock 2 single-player footage, Forza 3 has sold a million copies and will finally let you drive the Nissan GT-R R35 and for some reason they are making a Lego Harry Potter. Sales juggernaut (see what I did there?) Modern Warfare 2 accounted for 22% of all videogame sales in November. That's a lot of potential people who can Javelin-glitch me and then hurl homophobic slurs across the Internet! In industry news, Britain's government refuses to hand out juicy tax breaks to its beleaguered developers. I'm going to make the point that I like the games coming out of Britain a lot more than I like most of the ones coming out of Montreal, so it should be obvious where I stand on this. Speaking of Blighty, a Labour MP has started an advocacy group to convince other pols that gamers are not homophobic mass-murderers. I have to admit that both of these are way more progressive than the stuff that goes on in my federal government, which oscillate between increasingly grotesque prisoner-torture scandals and the death of someone's cat. Before you go today, make sure NOT to get a hair cut from this guy. Cripes. Read More.. | 2 Comments | |
| SunBurn Engine 1.2 - Xbox Development for the Masses | |
| Posted by: jkabus at 6:13:16 AM | |
 We are very excited to announce the release of SunBurn 1.2, by Synapse Gaming, which combines the latest lighting and rendering technology with affordable game development on Microsoft's Xbox 360.Featuring traditional and deferred rendering, greater control over the engine's internals, and an even more flexible API, SunBurn 1.2 can be tuned to precisely fit any game and development style. Read More.. | 0 Comments | |
| Tuesday, December 8, 2009 | |
| Game Developer's 2009 Front Line Award Finalists Announced | |
| Posted by: Drew Sikora at 9:30:19 PM | |
| The editors of Think Services' Game Developer magazine, a sister publication to Gamasutra, have named the finalists for the 2009 Front Line Awards, the magazine’s 12th annual evaluation of the year’s best game-making tools in the categories of programming, art, audio, game engine, middleware, and books. Read More.. | 0 Comments | |
| The Daily GameDev.Net | |
| Posted by: Promit Roy at 3:44:31 PM | |
| Yes, I know it's gotten a bit late in the day, but didn't you hear? This is a Finals Week 1 GameDev.Net Daily. It's the time of year that I remember exactly why I was so much happier out of school than in. I'd also like to point out that our little link tracking experiment is now over. I'm glad to report that your click data has been sold in exchange for many millions of money units in our favorite online games. The first piece of news is that the situation around Intel's Larrabee project has gotten somewhat complicated. Some people are reporting that the project as a consumer product has been shelved. Others are saying that the project to produce a consumer GPU is merely delayed, not canceled outright. The official line appears to be that "Larrabee will not be a consumer product." No word about, oh I don't know, Larrabee two. All the same, if you're one of the people who had your hopes up about Larrabee, this isn't great news. I always thought it was pretty ballsy to try and take down NVIDIA and ATI just like that...but I also believe that Intel's design is going to be the destination architecture for what graphics units will become. It will just take a few (more) years. Havok's just unveiled an annual independent developer licensing scheme that looks quite promising. It's really amazing to be an indie game developer these days. With all kinds of high end middleware at our disposal, people don't even have to fight with the likes of ODE to get their stuff done. (Yes, I think ODE sucks.) By the way, the gamer's charity Child's Play started their annual donation drive a couple weeks back. I'm not about to advocate any charity over any other, but if you're looking for one to give to it's a great choice I think. It turns out Apple does not like having their iPhone app reviews gamed and faked. Who would've thought? While it's perfectly obvious that plenty of developers exploit the ratings system via their marketing arms, these guys took it too far and now over a thousand applications by developer Molinker have been nuked. Incidentally, GDC is running a big iPhone games summit. You have to hand it to Apple; they've smoothly created a major game console without the Microsoft/Nintendo/Sony cabal even noticing until it was too late to strike back. In the realm of the utterly pointless, LEGO Harry Potter is on its way. Why? There's a number of negative news items out from various developers about layoffs, poor fiscal results, etc. But instead, I'd like to point out that THQ is opening an all-new Montreal studio next year. Sure the company nearly shut down Big Huge Games, a local developer here, and sure I've always felt that THQ was always a mismanaged mess of a place, but jobs are jobs. If you're in Montreal you might want to check your LinkedIn profile for THQ contacts, or just email THQ. I'll close today with Mirror's Edge on the iPhone. I don't usually like franchises being whored out, but Mirror's Edge is one I really wanted to succeed, which is why I bought the Xbox 360 game at $60, probably about double what it was actually worth. I really, really liked the game, and I'll probably buy it once it shows up on iTunes, which it apparently hasn't. Read More.. | 14 Comments | |
| Monday, December 7, 2009 | |
| The Daily GameDev.net | |
| Posted by: Mike Stedman at 9:55:13 AM | |
| When I was growing up in the old country, my mother would always turn to me and tell me that she wanted me to grow up and assemble news items for various people on the Internet. It was an odd thing for her to have said, since the Internet didn't yet exist, but regardless she was right. First off is the groundbreaking announcement that Mass Effect 2 will no longer have interminably long elevator rides. Instead, it has interminably long loading screens. This is progress. There's also some video of Brink and No More Heroes for the 360 and PS3. Penny Arcade recently celebrated its tenth anniversary, and THQ is putting even more people in Montreal. Even Conan O'Brien is getting in the indie gaming mood, with his inexplicable coverage of Sumotori Dreams. Did you know about Attract Mode, namely their ICETRIS ice cube trays? Better than Ikea, surely. As others have reported, Gamma IV will take place during next year's GDC and it has a one-button theme. If only I could remember what other contest had a one button theme... Like I said last week, part two of the Assemblee Contest has started. If you are a programmer or designer, it is now time to take the free assets that artistically inclined people have laboured over and pervert them to your own twisted whims. Kellee Santiago, who did Flow and Flower, had a presentation where she talks about why games aren't art. Before you go today, please drop by Promit's weblog and take a look at his speaker thing. If you live in his local area, please also stop by occasionally to make sure he has not electrocuted himself. Read More.. | 8 Comments | |
| Friday, December 4, 2009 | |
| Weekend Reading: Tales from Journal Land (x2!!) | |
| Posted by: Drew Sikora at 1:57:28 PM | |
| No I'm not switching this to bi-weekly, I simply took a real vacation last week for Thanksgiving. Which meant no work. Well. Almost. I tried really hard I swear. Entries from 11/20 - 12/3 Journal Land Picks of the Week Promit's Ventspace - Promit offers up some healthy advice on what you should really be thinking about should you want to startup and lead an online project in his journal article "Checklist to Lead an Online Game Project" Any Colour You Like - benryves has outdone himself in his electronic wizardry with a HUGE tutorial on the STM8S-Discovery, an 8-bit micro-controller he proceeds to make sing and dance. If you're into electronics in any way at all you will read this post or die of electric shock the next time you touch a circuit board. Oh and if that's not enough, you can check out his work with ATmega168 - he created a tetris and snake clone with source/binaries available for download Welcome back, or thanks for stopping by, blewisjr, sunandshadow, JTippetts, Knarkles and RanBlade! Read More.. | 0 Comments | |
| Audacity 1.3.10 (Beta) released | |
| Posted by: Drew Sikora at 4:19:34 AM | |
 The Audacity Team is pleased to announce the release of Audacity 1.3.10 (Beta) for Windows, Mac and Linux/Unix.This release removes a significant number of crash or freeze problems and other major bugs. It brings us very close to our goal of a new 2.0 Release. 1.3.10 is strongly recommended for users on Windows Vista and 7, rather than 1.2.6 Stable, which is now very old. We ask everyone to help us test 1.3.10 and let us know of any problems you find. Windows 7 support in 1.3.10 is still provisional, so we particularly welcome reports of issues found on that operating system. Read More.. | 1 Comments | |
| The Daily GameDev.net | |
| Posted by: Trent Polack at 12:09:27 AM | |
| Hi, Internet. How are you doing on this Friday? Apparently Austin is due for some snow today which may or may not cause widespread panic and terror in the city. So, okay. I know this is the game industry and we tend to be kind of bizarre, but seriously folks, this is getting out of control. The Saboteur has downloadable content to enable nudity in the game. According to source Shacknews: "'Adult content including nudity, a V.I.P. room and new hiding spots' is only available to PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 players if they download the Midnight Show add-on, according to Kotaku, which posted a screenshot of the in-game prompt." People who buy the game new will get a voucher for The Midnight Show DLC. People who get The Saboteur, presumably, second-hand can get the Midnight Show DLC separately for $3 or 240MS points. This is an actual thing, people. In completely unrelated news, NPD data shows that 82% of American children (ages 2-17) are 'gamers'; that's approximately 55.7 million people. A gamer in this case is someone who "[...] had to report that they currently, personally play video games on a PC/Mac, video game system or device used for gaming." That's a lot of wee gamers. I bet they all want the Midnight Show DLC for The Saboteur too. Games for Windows Live has finally joined in the digital distribution fun. Microsoft announced the addition of "Games on Demand" to the Games for Windows Live service yesterday with Resident Evil 5, Red Faction: Guerrilla, Battlestations: Pacific, Osmos, and World of Goo. Games for Windows Live Engagement Services general manager Mike Ybarra said: "We didn't just want to create a cut-and-paste version of existing digital distribution services, [...] Our goal has always been to create a seamless online gaming experience for the Windows community, and Games on Demand is a great step toward that end." Drew would want me to relay the news of Gran Turismo 5's "Time Trial Challenge" demo which is coming on December 17. The demo features two different versions of the Nissan 370Z, which is why Drew would want you to know about this. That about wraps it up for me. Video games. You should probably play Continuity, as an astute GameDev.net Daily reader (Omega147) correctly pointed out. Read More.. | 10 Comments | |
| Thursday, December 3, 2009 | |
| GDC Canada 2010 Opens Call for Submissions | |
| Posted by: Drew Sikora at 12:38:10 PM | |
 The call for submissions to present content for lectures, roundtables and panel sessions for the 2010 Game Developers Conference® Canada (GDC Canada) is now open through midnight, Tuesday, January 5, 2010. GDC Canada serves as a nexus point for established and promising young studios to learn best practices for developing new global titles and understanding emerging digital distribution models. The second annual GDC Canada is presented by Reboot Communications and Think Services, the organizers of the industry-leading Game Developers Conference. GDC Canada 2010 will return to the Vancouver Convention Centre in Vancouver, BC from May 6-7, 2010.Read More.. | 0 Comments | |
| The Daily GameDev.net | |
| Posted by: Drew Sikora at 12:32:22 PM | |
 I've been away a while, so some of today's news is actually last week's news, but if it's the first you've heard of it then it's still relevant right? And no, there won't be a Daily on Christmas day. I'll have to think of some other gift to give you all I suppose. There *might* be a Daily on New Years Day if I'm in any shape to type on a computer keyboard.Studio news: Silicon Knights, Streamline, Undead Labs, Sledghammer Games. Silicon Knights bossman Denis Dyack has looked back on the industry's job losses over the past year and a half and calls the event "staggering", but he can't help note that with all the studio closures, his is now one of the oldest that are still largely intact. Not only does he intend to keep it that way, but he has hope for the rest of the province of Ontario as well, saying Before, Ontario was a little isolated, there wasn't a lot of videogame companies here. But that's going to change. With all the positive steps that the government's done - were were huge proponents off - Ubisoft coming in for example, that's going to change everything for the better. I'm really looking forward to that, we're super-excited." US-based Streamline Studios has been >forced to close their Amsterdam studio due to a "perfect storm" of events - loss of contracts, loss of clients and the increase of the Euro over the American Dollar. It's just another wake-up call to the rest of us - stay on your toes, business people! Over in Seattle, we welcome the birth of brand new studio Undead Labs, headed up by former Blizzard and NCSoft employee Jeff Strain. The studio is currently hard at work on their flagship title, an MMOZ (massively multiplayer online zombie) game. Holy awesome. Finally, a new California Bay Area-based studio has also been announced - Sledgehammer Games is under the command of former Dead Space lead developers Glen Schofield and Michael Condry and is working on an unannounced new title possibly "based on one of Activision’s existing franchises". Litigation News: Modern Warfare 2, Crazy Lawsuit Guy. In serious news, Modern Warfare 2 is in for a fight down under, as South Australian Attorney General Michael Atkinson will be fighting to remove the game's MA15+ rating. Since Australia doesn't have anything higher than MA15+ (due largely to Atkinson's own insistence) if he succeeds that would effectively ban MW2 from being sold in Australia, until developer Infinity Ward can scramble to edit down the game's violence - if that's even an option for them. Let's all join in on the cheer: "Mike! Mike! He's our man - if he can't do it... GREAT!!" Annnd over in not-so-serious news, we have one Erik Estavillo, who has so far tried to sue Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo, followed by Activision Blizzard. His reasons range from Blizzard making their WoW characters walk too slow to get more monthly fees out of users, to the 360's RROD causing him too much sadness and depression. Review Scores: Not That Important. Industry analysts Doug Creutz and Jesse Divnich have both spoken out against review scores as the driving factor behind a game's success. Over at Gamasutra, Creutz notes that "We believe that while Metacritic scores may be correlated to game quality and word of mouth, and thus somewhat predictive of title performance, they are unlikely in and of themselves to drive or undermine the success of a game." Meanwhile at the Montreal International Games Summit late last month, Divnich gave a lecture on how key marketing is to a title's success, saying that without proper marketing "You can make the greatest game and it won't even matter. I know that's discouraging to developers at first but it's very true." Daily Remainders - more cool stories that didn't make the cut along with game dev articles/features. If you're pissed that Apple rejected your app idea, then join in with the other scorned developers over at Apple Rejected Me, which is sorta like FMyLife, but for app developers. I love a lot of features Wired does, and this one is most intriguing - they've taken a few photos of what look like average countryside, shoreline or cityscape, only underneath it all runs internet backbone data cables. Check out some of the real-world landmarks that are essential to our flow of digital information. Oh and no doubt the digital branch of Homeland Security is having fits over this. Read this post in ChineseRead More.. | 6 Comments | |
| Unity iPhone 1.5.1 and Unity 2.6.1 are both available now! | |
| Posted by: Drew Sikora at 10:27:53 AM | |
 Unity iPhone 1.5.1The Unity iPhone 1.5.1 update was recently released and is a critical update for everyone who is using Unity to develop content for the iPhone or iPod Touch. In order to ensure compliance with Apple's application submission requirements, as of Unity iPhone 1.5.1 we no longer make use of native API calls. Of course there are other updates as well, including both documentation and functional improvements, along with a number of bug fixes. Unity 2.6.1 In addition to the Unity iPhone update mentioned above we've been busy at work on Unity as well and want to let everyone know about the recent Unity 2.6.1 update. This update includes a number of important bug fixes and updates, including full Unity Web Player support for Safari running as a 64-bit application on Mac OSX 10.6. Read More.. | 0 Comments | |
| Wednesday, December 2, 2009 | |
| The Daily GameDev.net | |
| Posted by: Oli Wilkinson at 3:37:28 PM | |
| Na then. A late, and short, GDNet daily on what is personally a very important day for little ol' me. On wi' show then. Torque about price drops: TorquePowered have finally announced a response to the free version of Unity and the Unreal Development kit... it is... *drumroll*, a cut-price version of Torque Pro! A sourcecode-free version of the Torque Engine is yours for only $100 during December, afterwards it goes up to $250 a seat. It;s a good deal but in light of what you can get elsewhere I can't help feel it should have been more, really. What's your opinions dalyiverse? Nobody tell Tim: Mirror's Edge is leaping onto the iPhone in January 2010. I'd love to see the dookiestorm that old Langdell and co kicks up about this now, especially after their recent outburts/mad ramblings. What will Apple do? Only time will tell. Popcorn firmly in hand. Defeating the point?: So Logitec are talking about releasing a UMD addon for the PSP Go. Are you serious? Isn't the whole point of the the Go that you get to go UMD free? I appreciate that people may have old UMD dics sat around so in a way can't really fault Logitec from making a quick buck from the market. I do find the duality of the PSP and PSP Go quite odd though. Maybe the Go is an experiment to see if it sells enough to pull the old versions. As we saw last week, Go sales figures aren't great so far. Medal of Honor: So Modern Warfare has been huge. No wait, I mean H-U-G-E. Who can blame EA from wading in with a similar "modern day" epic with their Medal of Honor franchise? Well, it turns out the next installment will be set in Afghanistan. I can't wait to feel the rush of having inadequate equipment, a lack of soldiers - random deaths from IED's and so on. Hey, I wonder if we'd also get the NPCs spitting in our faces and reels of polticians attempting to justify the engagement in any way they can. That's war, soldier. Games ain't so bad: So we all know that the mainstream media hates games. They corrupt us, make us kill civilains in airports - surely this warrants angry parents pulling the games from shelves, setting fire to them and writing to the Daily Mail about what a horrific impact they have on poor little Jonny. TIGA have revealed that the BBFC (the guys who rate films in the UK) have rejected three times as many films as games in the past 5 years. We can either glean that a) more sicko film producers are out there than game studios or b) games really aren't that bad. TIGA argue that games don't warrant this unfair sterotype that films seem to avoid - I'm inclined to agree. Read More.. | 4 Comments | |
| The results for the second annual Gamedev.net Composition Contest are in! | |
| Posted by: Drew Sikora at 2:17:06 AM | |
 GameDev.net was proud to sponsor the second annual composition contest, where entrants were charged with composing a short sequence to a game demo for a share of $175 in Amazon gift money. The crown this time around goes to Michal Cieleki (mirrored). Hit the jump for runners-up and full contest details.Read More.. | 0 Comments | |
| Tuesday, December 1, 2009 | |
| Emergent Partners With Sundog for Sky Effects | |
| Posted by: Sundog Software, LLC at 11:41:44 PM | |
| Sundog Software LLC, a leading developer of computer graphics middleware for rendering the sky and 3D clouds, has partnered with Emergent Game Technologies, a worldwide leader in game development services and tools. An integration of Sundog's SilverLining SDK with Emergent's Gamebryo® LightSpeed™ is available today, and brings physically realistic skies, clouds, lighting, and precipitation effects to licensed users of LightSpeed. Read More.. | 0 Comments | |
| Call For PAX East Panel Submissions Open | |
| Posted by: The Bohle Company at 6:33:22 PM | |
| BOSTON – Nov. 30, 2009 – The call for speaker/panel submissions for PAX East 2010 has opened and will run till Jan. 11, 2010. Read More.. | 0 Comments | |
| The Daily GameDev.Net | |
| Posted by: Promit Roy at 3:11:46 PM | |
| If you're in college/university, you have a very special time of the year ahead of you. Most people refer to this time as "the holiday season". However, you know and I know that this is not the holiday season, but in fact the season of hellish, packed together deadlines, exams, final projects, and inexplicable parties being thrown by people who by all rights should be as panicked as you. Let's get on with a Let the Holiday Season Begin! GameDev.Net Daily. Oh, and note that some of these posts will now be tracking your click-throughs, mainly for our curiosity. Naturally your click data will not be used for any other purpose or sold to any party, unless we really want to in which case the terms of your user agreement -- agreed to by reading this paragraph -- will be changed retroactively without prior notice. Thanks! Valve is thrilled because Left 4 Dead 2 sold 2 million copies in two weeks. Granted they discounted the game heavily pretty much everywhere, and it's certainly no Modern Warfare 2, and they probably lost as many as five sales due to that boycott of gullible people being angry about something or the other. Still though, an impressive performance. Should make for some good multiplayer fun. With all these millions upon millions of game sales happening, it's just not very environmentally friendly these days. Luckily some particularly enterprising soul has come up with this Eco-Box packaging for Xbox 360 games. By reducing the amount of plastic by just a bit on each disc, they hope to make the world a better place. The tech would be fairly complex to describe in detail, but seems to be focused around the concept of a "hole", which you can probably look up on Wikipedia. I guess the Xbox 360 is the platform of choice for the eco-friendly video-game trained murderous teenager. And yes, I continue to enjoy the costume improvements in Mass Effect 2. On the subject of development, the people behind Heavy Rain are out to prove that video games can be meaningful. Personally I'm thinking that Kojima may have beat them to the punch, but perhaps unlike Kojima they will produce a game that is both meaningful and coherent. Then again they've called it an "interactive movie" and I've always been a little wary of developers who get too wrapped up in being artistic. Oh, and it's a PS3 exclusive so apparently Sony has a monopoly on meaningful interactive movies. If you've been waiting for DirectX 11 to prove itself, Dirt 2 is just about ready to try and make the sale. The PC demo of the game is out, thoughtfully packing the exact same two tracks as the console demos. (Don't worry, they're good tracks. It's a good game.) The game will be out in a few days, and it also includes a benchmark so you can expect to see plenty of attention for the game on the hardware reviewers' sites for years to come. I missed this by over a month, but better late than never. I know Street Fighter is all the rage again these days, but I grew up on Tekken and I have a soft spot for it. Here is the GameTrailers video review of the game. A stand-out game? Not really, and I'd actually rather see a new Dead or Alive title. Still, I'm not too shy about occasional nostalgia. Read More.. | 7 Comments | |
| EMotion FX character animation SDK is a perfect match for Wii developers | |
| Posted by: MysticGD at 1:28:02 PM | |
| Rotterdam, Netherlands - December 2nd, 2009 - MysticGD, a leader in real-time character animation middleware, today mentioned that the EMotion FX character animation SDK is a perfect animation solution for developers creating games for the Nintendo Wii, both feature and pricing wise. "EMotion FX offers a lot of very useful features that can really boost performance and reduce memory footprint, especially on platforms such as the Wii. We have spent the last year working closely together with companies such as Ubisoft and Headstrong to make sure we offer the quality level we always aim for. With several successful EMotion FX powered games now in stores for the Wii, it is safe to say that EMotion FX is a great match for this platform." said John van der Burg, Development Director. Read More.. | 0 Comments | |
| Nordic Game 2010 Dates Set | |
| Posted by: Drew Sikora at 8:53:51 AM | |
 The organisers of the Nordic Game conference are happy to announce the date for the 2010 edition of the leading european industry conference. So draw a red circle in your calendars now: Next year's Nordic Game will be held on 27-29 April, 2010.The seventh edition of the continuously growing conference will take place in Malmö, Sweden, and Copenhagen, Denmark, in a world premiering two-city multi event. More information coming soon! Read about it at www.nordicgame.com. Read More.. | 0 Comments | |
| Garry's Mod - Gamemode Contest - $10,000 worth of prizes! | |
| Posted by: Facepunch Studios at 7:39:03 AM | |
 Facepunch Studios are having a Gamemode coding contest. Here's the facts:• Code a Gamemode for Garry's Mod (http://www.garrysmod.com/) • In Lua • For a share of $10,000 For more details please see the official contest page here: http://frettacontest.facepunchstudios.com/ Read More.. | 0 Comments | |
| Monday, November 30, 2009 | |
| Remo 3D™ v2.0: Scripts, new tools and new modern look! | |
| Posted by: Remograph at 2:11:46 PM | |
| Remograph is pleased to announce that Remo 3D™ v2.0 has now been released! This new major version of Remo 3D™ contains a lot of updates including support for scripts and macros, a new modern graphical user interface and new convenient tools for modeling of soft and round shapes. The full list of new features and improvements in Remo 3D™ v2.0 can be found in the release notes on our website: http://www.remograph.com Read More.. | 0 Comments | |
| The Daily GameDev.net | |
| Posted by: Mike Stedman at 10:11:51 AM | |
| Today's GDNet Daily will be fairly abbreviated, as outside of killer Black Friday deals, most Americans were enjoying turkey and doing something or other with football, probably. Us Canadians had our Thanksgiving back in October, where it's warmer and more enjoyable. I'm not saying we're the superior country in North America or anything, but, well, in the face of evidence like that... Today's top news is the Facebook announcement of a new Duke Nukem game. You may also be interested in some new Mass Effect 2 trailers. Before we go any further, we need to have a frank discussion. Growing up in the arcades, I was always more of a fan of the technically-complex SNK fighting games instead of the relatively low-powered Capcom fighting games (none of us particularly enjoyed the stiff and unpleasant Mortal Kombat games). To that effect, I am extremely fearful about the quality of the King of Fighters movie, having seen pretty much every Street Fighter movie that has ever come out. In indie games, you might be interested in Captain Successor; I found the controls kind of wonky, but then again I was building a ship that was wider than it was long. I also like the idea of Level Up and Osmos but haven't played either one yet, and holy crap is Driftmoon ever gorgeous. Speaking of TIGSource, if you're an artist or a musician and you're frustrated by all the effort it takes to get your art shooting at each other and receiving experience points, you should check out their Assemblee Competition. You make beautiful works of art in part one, and then a gruff, unshaven programmer steps in and makes studly games out of your stuff. Sony is still working on PlayStation Home, and one of their latest additions is this really creepy elf. Some golden-tongued soldier has managed to convince the Royal Navy to give him (and 229 others) a PSP for "studying." Before you go today, check out this guy's emotional piano playing. Great stuff. Read More.. | 5 Comments | |
| HPMC, a smalll GPLl OpenGL/C/C++-library for GPU iso-surface extraction | |
| Posted by: sintef.no/heterocomp at 5:10:31 AM | |
 The Heterogeneous Computing Group at Sintef is proud to present HPMC, a small multi-platform OpenGL/C/C++-library that extractes iso-surfaces of volumetric data directly on the GPU. It is distributed under GPL 2.0, with commercial license available.For source, doucmentation, sample apps and videos, http://www.sintef.no/hpmc Read More.. | 0 Comments | |
| Friday, November 27, 2009 | |
| The Daily GameDev.net | |
| Posted by: Trent Polack at 12:04:37 AM | |
| Happy Black Friday (in the US) and Just Another Friday (elsewhere). Since yesterday was Thanksgiving us here in the US, it wasn't much of a news day. I'm not really sure how much valuable information I can give you all today. I could tell you about my somewhat unwilling foray into an attempt at online dating, but, yeah, no. So video games! The big news for anyone right now is probably about sales (Black Friday thing) and in that spirit I give unto you an enormous array of discount video games. Steam's list is particularly brutal. Gamasutra has a great piece by the consummate thinker Chris Remo entitled "Looking for Meaning in Games." In the piece, Remo analyzes what he felt to be a recurring theme of the Montreal International Game Summit (MIGS) which was to "reconsider the expressive or creative possibilities of games." It's been kind of a theme in the game industry as a whole this year as we've seen a major rise in the activity of the independent game development space. I won't do the piece a disservice by summarizing it; you should just read it. Imminently. On the topic of Gamasutra, the site ran a postmortem piece with developer 8Monkey's about the development of Darkest of Days. Postmortems about super successful games are always interesting, but there's something amazing about an honest postmortem about a somewhat less-than-stellar game. Darkest of Days was a game that had an amazing and fantastic concept and, while I didn't play it, appeared to be executed very well all things considered. Square-Enix Europe announced on Wednesday that they are "restructuring" the UK-based game development company Beautiful Game Studios. Beautiful is the developer of the Championship Manager games. According to Square-Enix: "We have taken a decision to re-focus our vision for the franchise and redefine our business model to build a successful commercial future for the Championship Manager brand. Our current business model does not allow us to compete in a fast-changing industry with any degree of flexibility or commercial confidence. [...] To achieve this, we will be re-structuring Beautiful Game Studios, which will regrettably bring with it unavoidable job losses. We aim to have this completed before the end of this calendar year." According to Gamasutra, roughly 80% of jobs are being cut or relocated. That's all I've got for you today, folks. Enjoy your (hopefully) long weekend. Play some video games, eat an over-abundance of food, and check your e-mail inbox constantly. Erm. That last one is more for me. Read More.. | 3 Comments | |
| Wednesday, November 25, 2009 | |
| Audiokinetic Releases Wwise 2009.3 and Announces New Pricing | |
| Posted by: Karine Legeron - Audiokinetic at 3:47:48 PM | |
| Audiokinetic Inc., the leading audio solution provider for the video game industry, released today the latest version of Wwise, its award-winning audio pipeline solution. Wwise 2009.3 introduces new features and enhancements, including access to two McDSP plug-ins. Audiokinetic also unveiled a new pricing structure that will allow customers to save up to 20% on purchase of the company’s product families. Read More.. | 0 Comments | |
